safe sins

Jon from stuff christians like, writes on the common small group experience of confessing 'safe sins' rather than the biggies that are really plaguing us. Confessing so called 'safe sins', like not reading your bible enough, apparently shuts down the possibility of anyone else confessing the more unacceptable sins like pornography.

I have some sympathy for his post. It's not good if we can't trust eachother enough to confess the real sins that we are struggling with. Much worse if we can't trust God to forgive us and help us deal with black and ugly parts of our lives.

But I think that when we start ranking sins we run the risk of forgetting that all sin is bad. Black and ugly, disfigured and disgusting. Socially acceptable or not.

And when such a big deal is made of confession and authenticity and openness and the group experience, the danger is that we'll forget what it's actually all about - repentance, which means change.

I think that if we're not serious about actually changing, there's little point in doing the confession thing at all.